So, I was watching an anime called Weiss Kreuz, aka Knight Hunters. (Yes, I know that Weiss Kreuz is bad German for something that is not “knight hunters”. They have a hospital named “Magic Bus”, I don’t think there’s any kind of intent of coherence in the use of non-Japanese languages.)

It’s awful. I men, really, truly, awful. The characters are not two-dimensional; no, they’re like those cardboard standups, where there’s a tiny little two-dimensional bit jutting out the back to stabilize them a bit. The result is almost worse; their dark pasts are incoherent and do nothing to justify their surreal presents.

The heroes (if we may use the term) are a group of four “beautiful” (bishounen, anyway) assassins, who work for an organisation called “Weiss”, where they are assigned the task of destroying truly evil people. For instance, in one episode, a girl wakes up in a swimming pool full of ice, to find that she’s had her kidney stolen! It turns out there is a deadly team of rogue doctors (well, a rogue doctor) who have a movable medical facility, and they are harvesting the organs of the young for various customers. Weiss gets involved after the girl calls a late-night radio program with her story; she had no one else to turn to, as the police didn’t believe her. (Presumably, they thought the missing kidney was the result of mere youthful high spirits.)

Now, here’s the thing. When the omnious shadowy figure that orders them arround commands them to kill (“Hunters of Night, deny these Dark Beasts their tomorrows!”), the targets are always, well… It’s the doctor. Nothing is done about his clients. When a trio of kidnappers is caught, after kidnapping twenty children for some other organization, it’s just the kidnappers they go after. There’s no hint (at least early on) of any kind of search for the customers, so one can only imagine that, three days later, new patsies have been found to continue getting killed by the pretty boys.

What would have made this great would have been the discovery that Weiss is the criminal organization hiring these people, and the assassins are just cleaning up loose ends. That would have been a cool story. Instead, it’s just anatomically-questionable fan service, and mediocre angst.

Comments

Actually, if it has a little tab sticking out the back that would make the cardboard standups 3-D. They're already 2-D, because they have both a width and a length. Adding a thingy at the back would give them depth.